Some Nikki Haley voters are hanging on to her candidacy and, like her, refuse to endorse Trump

• Marc Levy/The Associated Press
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  Covering Pennsylvania politics, government & scandals for @AP. The wicked flee when none pursueth. @Colorado native. As honest as a Denver man can be.

When Nikki Haley suspended her presidential campaign, she refused to endorse Donald Trump as the last remaining major candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination — and apparently so did some of her supporters in Pennsylvania.

Haley won almost 17% of Pennsylvania’s primary vote Tuesday, or 1 in 6 votes, to Trump’s 83%, despite not campaigning for president since she ended her bid in early March.

Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes up for grabs in the presidential election make it a premier battleground state. So should those Haley GOP voters refuse to support Trump in November, it could prove a damaging blow to his prospects for victory in the state and, possibly, reelection.

Haley’s base was never big enough to seriously challenge Trump before he clinched a third straight Republican presidential nomination.

But with nearly all ballots counted in Pennsylvania’s primary, the former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor tallied more than 156,000 votes, or about twice the 80,500-vote margin by which Democrat Joe Biden beat Trump in Pennsylvania in 2020. Pennsylvania’s election was even closer in 2016, when Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton by 44,000 votes.

A larger proportion of votes for Haley tended to come from urban and suburban areas where Trump suffered massive losses in his two previous presidential campaigns.

On the Democratic side, U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips of Minnesota won 7% against Biden, or nearly 70,000 votes as of Wednesday morning. Counties had reported nearly 60,000 for write-in candidates. A handful of counties had not yet reported write-in totals, and the breakdown of write-in votes for “uncommitted” was not immediately available.

Phillips and Haley qualified for Pennsylvania’s primary ballot before they dropped out of the presidential race, and Biden and Trump are on track to win their parties’ presidential nominations and face each other in November’s general election. Phillips has endorsed Biden.

Berwood Yost, director of the Floyd Institute for Public Policy at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster County, said while this might not mean much for the November election, the Trump campaign should be worried particularly around suburban voters.

“One of the strongest divides in politics today has to do with education and these suburban communities have a bit more college-educated voters and those voters tend to be less supportive of some of the things that Trump has done,” he said.

Suburban counties, such as Dauphin and Lancaster, had around 20% of the vote going to Haley.

He said issues surrounding abortion rights may be particularly troubling for suburban women.

On the Democratic side, Biden had more support among his base overall but lacked in rural counties.

Yost said Trump should pull back some of his rhetoric that repels suburban voters, while Biden should do more outreach in rural communities.

He also said turnout for the primary was much lower than the total registered voters in Pennsylvania.

All told, about 1 million ballots have been counted apiece in Tuesday’s GOP and Democratic presidential primaries in Pennsylvania, out of 3.5 million registered Republican voters and 3.9 million registered Democratic voters.

Pennsylvania holds closed primary elections, meaning that someone must have been registered as a Republican or a Democrat by April 8 to have voted in the primary for that party.

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AP Director of Public Opinion Research Emily Swanson and WITF’s Ben Wasserstein contributed to this report.